Book Image

Unreal Engine 5 Game Development with C++ Scripting

By : ZHENYU GEORGE LI
Book Image

Unreal Engine 5 Game Development with C++ Scripting

By: ZHENYU GEORGE LI

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine is one of the most popular and accessible game engines in the industry, creating multiple job opportunities. Owing to C++ scripting's high performance, advanced algorithms, and engineering maintenance, it has become the industry standard for developing commercial games. However, C++ scripting can be overwhelming for anyone without a programming background. Unreal Engine 5 Game Development with C++ Scripting will help you master C++ and get a head start on your game development journey. You’ll start by creating an Unreal Engine C++ project from the shooter template and then move on to building the C++ project and the C++ code inside the Visual Studio editor. You’ll be introduced to the fundamental C++ syntax and essential object-oriented programming concepts. For a holistic understanding of game development, you’ll also uncover various aspects of the game, including character creation, player input and character control, gameplay, collision detection, UI, networking, and packaging a completed multiplayer game. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to create professional, high-quality games using Unreal Engine 5 with C++, and will have built a solid foundation for more advanced C++ programming and game development technologies.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Getting Started with Unreal C++ Scripting
6
Part 2 – C++ Scripting for Unreal Engine
12
Part 3: Making a Complete Multiplayer Game

Understanding the gameplay framework base classes

Unreal Engine provides gameplay framework base classes for developers so that they can use and inherit from these base classes to create their new game-specific classes. Before utilizing the base classes, you need to understand the definitions of these classes as well as the relationships between them. The following class diagram will give you an overall view of the classes and the inheritance relationships:

Figure 5.2 – UE5 gameplay framework classes diagram

Figure 5.2 – UE5 gameplay framework classes diagram

From the diagram, you can see the following:

  • UObject is the ancestor class of all the remaining classes
  • AActor is the base class that is inherited by three groups of subclasses including the game actor (APawn), game information (AInfo), and player controller (AController) subclasses
  • UActorComponent is the base class for all the component classes
  • UGameInstance is a globally unique game instance manager class that can be extended...